One of mankind's greatest challenges has been the design of an odorless litter box which does not have to be cleaned very often but is easy to clean when such is necessary. This challenge is documented by the issuance of literally hundreds of patents over the years for new types of litter boxes and litter box apparatus. As a result of this effort, granular kitty litter material was developed to reduce the odors associated with pet waste and to make it easy to clean a litter box. While kitty litter material achieves both of these objectives to some degree, to most people the smell is still quite objectionable. Accordingly, many people change all of the kitty litter material in the litter box even through the cat may have only used the litter box once or twice. As a result, a lot of essentially unused kitty litter ends up being thrown out and, thus, is wasted.
In trying to solve the kitty litter wastage problem, a number of litter box arrangements have been developed which separate the pet's solid waste matter or excrement from the granular kitty litter material. Many of these devices are kitty litter sifting devices which sift the kitty litter from the solid pet excrement. Such devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,505,226 to Carlson; 4,359,966 to Casino; 4,325,822 to Miller; 4,217,857 to Geddie; 3,908,597 to Taylor; 3,796,188 to Bradstreet and 3,141,441 to Russell.
Another interesting pet waste disposal device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,047,499 to Janecek. The Janecek device has an intermediate resilient portion which is folded to form a pouring channel for disposing of the waste matter having been deposited on the device. While interesting, this device does not sift litter material from the waste. Accordingly, this device would result in the wastage of a lot of kitty litter material.
While all of the devices disclosed in the aforementioned patents undoubtedly work as intended, there still remains a need for a device which not only sifts kitty litter from pet excrement but is also easy to use. Such a device would also preferably sift the kitty litter material from the pet excrement very quickly. In addition, such a device would preferably be very easy to reinstall in the litter box after it has been used.